§ 1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns determining additional content from target content and may be used to increase the effectiveness of advertising, such as on-line advertising.
§ 1.2 Background Information
The Internet provides many with access to information of interest. A user might request a document that may concern a topic of interest. Sometimes, however, the document might not turn out to have exactly what the user is looking for, or the user may desire to obtain additional information on the topic. Hypertext links between documents that may concern the same or related topics allow users to navigate or “surf” the Internet in their quest for information on the topic of their interest. However, such links are typically embedded in the document by an author of the document and may be relatively static. Accordingly, the usefulness of links often depends on the foresight and knowledge of the author. Accordingly, there is a need to help users to find content of interest.
Moreover, the Internet is often a useful conduit for companies to relay information about their products and services to potential customers. Therefore, there is a need for companies to put their information before users. To do so, they must entice users to a particular Web page or Website. This will often not happen unless the user is motivated to do so. One way to motivate a user to go to a particular Web page or Website is via on-line ads. Normally, when a member of the advertising audience (referred to as a “viewer” or “user” in the Specification without loss of generality) selects an ad by clicking on it, an embedded hypertext link typically directs the viewer to the advertiser's Website. This process, wherein the viewer selects an ad, is commonly referred to as a “click-through” (“Click-through” is intended to cover any user selection.). The ratio of the number of click-throughs to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed or otherwise rendered) is commonly referred to as the “click-through rate” or “CTR” of the ad.
A “conversion” is said to occur when a user consummates a transaction related to a previously served ad. What constitutes a conversion may vary from case to case and can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, it may be the case that a conversion occurs when a user clicks on an ad, is referred to the advertiser's Web page, and consummates a purchase there before leaving that Web page. Alternatively, a conversion may be defined as a user being shown an ad, and making a purchase on the advertiser's Web page within a predetermined time (e.g., seven days). In yet another alternative, a conversion may be defined by an advertiser to be any measurable/observable user action such as, for example, downloading a white paper, navigating to at least a given depth of a Website, viewing at least a certain number of Web pages, spending at least a predetermined amount of time on a Website or Web page, registering on a Website, etc. Often, if user actions don't indicate a consummated purchase, they may indicate a sales lead, although user actions constituting a conversion are not limited to this. Indeed, many other definitions of what constitutes a conversion are possible. The ratio of the number of conversions to the number of impressions of the ad (i.e., the number of times an ad is displayed or otherwise rendered) is commonly referred to as the conversion rate. If a conversion is defined to be able to occur within a predetermined time since the serving of an ad, one possible definition of the conversion rate might only consider ads that have been served more than the predetermined time in the past.
Although untargeted online ads may be useful, online ads targeted to the user (e.g., to the user's present topic of interest, to the user's location, to the user's demographic, etc.) generally perform better. For example, search engines, such as Google for example, have enabled advertisers to target their ads so that they will be rendered in conjunction with a search results page responsive to a query that is relevant, presumably, to the ad. Although search result pages afford advertisers a great opportunity to target their ads to a more receptive audience, search result pages are merely a fraction of page views of the World Wide Web. To increase advertising opportunities, some online advertising systems may use ad relevance information and document content relevance information (e.g., concepts or topics, feature vectors, etc.) to “match” ads to (and/or to score ads with respect to) a document including content, such as a Web page for example. (See, e.g., U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/375,900, titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003, listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Bucheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”).) The foregoing ad serving systems can be thought of as keyword-targeted systems (where ads are targeted using terms found in a search query) and content-targeted systems (where ads are targeted using content of a document).
Although keyword and content targeted ad serving, when executed well, have provided users with information relevant to a current interest and have therefore been very effective at enticing users to visit Web pages linked from such ads (also referred to as an “ad landing page”), there remains a desire to improve the performance of on-line advertising.